1. because I never understood: I called it down-syndrome/handicap/retarded/a disease that destroys the brain/the body before it has a chance to fall into this world: wet & cold days, waiting on the bus and its long mechanical tongue rolling towards us: me in my mittens, my sister in her wheelchair, my mother behind us both, pushing us towards its teeth, not out of cruelty, but because all children are eventually swallowed: tomorrow I’ll be the stupid boy holding a bag of chips out to the boy with one eye on his forehead, the other brown like mine: he sees right through me and knows that I’m afraid: my mother hits me upside the head and commands me to share in this waiting while my sister/her daughter is held down on a table somewhere, racked by machines & needles to determine why she is still alive: this was supposed to be a definition poem, but I’d rather define the shape of my ignorance/my mother’s loss/my own silent betrayal when years later, out of nowhere, my mother said I never meant for us to grow up so fast: apologizing for the simple fact we were alive: I forgot my tongue: I want back the years when my mother was younger than I am now, raising two children, and would sometimes burst into song: I am immortal, I have inside me blood of kings! and made me a believer that be it flood or fire, hurricane or heart attack, gunshot or simply the body giving itself back to dust, we could never die: save slowly, until there was only one of us left